disrupting myself, or the jump from Product Marketing to Product Management

Product Manager Day 119: Backlog into Roadmap?

This article from MindTheProduct (and it’s links) has been a helpful read in formulating a Product Roadmap thus far. What I’m struggling with is applying the concepts. It’s quite good for when you’re starting afresh – but I’m not sure how best to apply it when you take over a project halfway.

So far I’ve taken a somewhat bottoms-up approach: listing out the key features / developments for the next 3 releases (each is about 3-4 weeks), and then having a separate list of to-dos, containing both unrefined stories, as well as smaller but important requests – separate from the backlog. I’m not too happy with it so far though.

The concerns:

It’s a very short-term approach and doesn’t quite “plot” the larger stories to give them some sort of timeline

If I do plot the larger stories, how do I go about it? How do you estimate when you have different types of items in the roadmap (more refined VS less refined)?

How do you add triaged feedback along the way to the roadmap? (see diagram below) Although this should be clearer once I sort out 1 and 2.

One thing I’m thankful so far is that my stakeholders trust that I’m doing good work so far, so communicating a new approach to the roadmap shouldn’t be an issue. The concern is building that roadmap, and a process to keep it in shape.

I jumped from Product Marketing to Product Management at Zalora recently. These posts represent a journal of my learnings and reflections – you can keep track of my journey by joining the mailing list here.